The first good rain we’ve had in a while was the day our family bid a final farewell to our mother.
Between the showers on Saturday afternoon, we spread her ashes on the soft ground holding dogwood trees that line a slice of Lake Allatoona, just off the Old Highway 41, and close to downtown Acworth.
After more than 15 years since she left Georgia, and two months after her death, my mother, whose name was Arlyn Culpepper, finally came back home to stay.
The small beachhead and pavilion near the shore form a rustic church retreat of which our East Cobb congregation was a part. It was also one of her favorite places, for the sense of peace, faith and family they provided.
On the Labor Day holiday, a big corn roast was always the method of celebration, and we reprised that tradition as we gathered again at Lutherwood.
Our family picnic on Saturday featured plenty of unshucked ears, bratwurst, hamburgers and I can’t remember what else.
We tried to recreate that sense of familiarity that binds families together, and honors those who have left us.
It has been decades since I went there, but upon first sight the memories came flooding back.
For our mother, the South wasn’t home, but it’s where she moved to from her native Wisconsin as a young mother, married to an aspiring homebuilder. Georgia, and metro Atlanta, was where many homes were being built in the early 1960s.
As I started school, we moved to Cobb County, finally settling in East Cobb in the 1970s. It wasn’t easy raising three young children, and after my parents divorced, it got even tougher for her.
Even before she remarried, what she wanted for us was some stability, and that meant more than anything, a sense of home. She bought an early 1960s ranch house right behind our church on Lower Roswell Road as I entered middle school.
For her, being able to walk to our church, Faith Lutheran, just as she did as a young girl, was an important part of restoring a sense of home.
For me, living within a short walk of the ball fields, tennis courts and swimming pool of Sewell Park, and the old East Marietta Library, finally gave me a sense of home.
I left for most of the 1980s, away at college and big-city life in my 20s. When I came back home in the early 1990s, I was shocked. East Cobb was starting to feel more like a city, and less like a suburb.
“What happened?” I once asked mother. “Everybody moved here,” she said.
But when I visited the house, nothing else mattered. Not just the plates of leftovers I took home with me, but the comfort of familiar surroundings and chatter.
She spent those empty-nest years involved in church activities, attending classes at the Enrichment of Life Movement in Marietta, knitting and quilting for cancer patients and family members, and dogsitting for their neighbors.
When she and my stepfather retired to Florida, I knew it would never be the same. They enjoyed those years living near the beach, but after his death in 2015, mother didn’t have much time herself.
Her arthritis and scoliosis worsened, and about a year and a half ago she developed lung cancer that she didn’t tell us much about until it was too late.
Over the holidays, she was hospitalized, but was too weak to endure chemotherapy. She had had enough of doctors, and the pain she was going through, and didn’t want us to deal with months of preparing for the inevitable.
After her funeral in Fort Walton Beach, we looked through so many of the photos she had kept over the years, many of which I had forgotten about. Including my first sports team:
I’m No. 20, seated at the bottom right in the first row, and haven’t seen this in decades. I couldn’t believe she kept this photo, and my grade-school pictures (I’ll spare you those!).
The memories they provide are priceless, but for me, they reinforced the importance of a sense of home.
I don’t meant to prattle on about this, but as I continue on in middle age, those things have become even more important, and not just because I’m building a community news site.
Everybody else in my family lives along the Gulf Coast (I should take a hint!), and while I love going down to visit, this place we call East Cobb is home for me. Of all the many things she did for us, this is one of the finest gifts of all.
My mother missed the seasons in Marietta after she moved to Florida, and always enjoyed returning home for visits in the spring and the fall.
I wish she could have come back for one more trip before her health declined, but I’m comforted that she’s resting close by in perpetuity, near the home—and the sense of place—that she bestowed to us all.
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